I am now learning new stuff in max and continuously read through one very "fat" book, max encyclopedia in 1200 pages approx. It goes very detailed into many stuff.Knowing, or should I say, guessing how unpopular Compound object section amongst max users could be, I nevertheless found this interesting enough to post. Have you, people, messing around with so called Mesher? It is special compund object which can turn a particle system into mesh so you can apply to it modifiers like bend, twist and animate them if you like? I found it quite interesting to play with.

Particle field is still covered in fog to me but here I add quick and draft test I did just now. See video and picture below. Not a Houdini magic but still...Maybe it's just me who didn't know of this mesher but who knows - max is kinda deep you know

Well, I guess reason why this and other tools from compound section aren't so popular could be explained mainly due to unpopularity of boolean operations because of their topology crippling side-effect. That's understandable. But I decided to give more closer look into this tools. They aren't so bad and patiently and inteligently working with booleans can yield very great results in lesser times. And now in max is pro-boolean added.

By the way, than next question from me. Have some of you also played with such tool in max as scatter? It is found also under compound objects. Will try to post few quick results which might give you perhaps some ideas.

As for mesher object. Now I just come to think of what could be done in max if one could try something like this. Once you converted some nasty particle stuff into mesher than applied some animated modifiers. Than turn all this stuff into Point Cache and than again apply some modifiers if you want to make things even crazier. And what came into my head, just as loud idea - is it possible to somehow all this created particle/mesher/animated modifier crazyness add into reactor simulations either as rigid body or as soft body element or whatever? Just curious if that's possible. Not sure, don't know reactor that much. But still, what if...